you don't like my attitude

Main menu

Tag Archives: Final Fantasy VII

Let’s be frank: bad games abound in this industry. It wouldn’t be imprudent to say that most titles that come out are poor creations meant solely to win a buck and not advance games as an art form or a mode of entertainment. The mountains of mini-game collections for the Wii, the endless hack-n-slash ripoffs that come out for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, and even the computer titles that–even though some are decent–are shipped broken, requiring patches to fix. There’s a lot of bad stuff out there, and for the casual gamer, it can be quite daunting.

This shouldn’t get anyone down down. Having an art form buried underneath a pile of schlock is the hallmark of Hollywood, the music industry, and television. It means that the mainstream has finally discovered video games as a means of telling a story, for better or worse. Which means, indirectly, bigger budgets, bigger stakes, and more advanced titles, which translates into more scrutiny and better storytelling.

I have written extensively about music in my life, although for the most part it has been about what I listened to after I began to grow up. Most people have a point where they start to make choices for themselves as far as what art they want to consume. For me, that time was right around age 12, and I did it harder than a lot of people do. I sort of unilaterally decided that my parents’ music sucked and started making choices for myself. The first music I bought for myself? Pearl Jam’s Ten. On cassette.

Music in games is a very strange thing. Given how, over the short lifespan of the medium, sound in general has been treated, the way that music has evolved has a sort of logic to it that sort of defies conventional explanation. Being both a sadist and a pretentious prick, I am going to go ahead with that anyway.

I was as late to the party on the Super NES as I really ever have been on a video game system. It came out in the US in 1991, and while we’d rented one several times and played a fair share of Super Mario World and F-Zero, it was not until my brother got one for his birthday in the summer of 1994 that it became ours. (For a point of reference, we got a Sega CD before we got the SNES. That was, for lack of a better word, a blunder.)